A number of mail sorting apparatus exist that can handle the sorting of outgoing mail. Few machines exist that can effectively handle the requirements of incoming mail sorting. Quite often, outgoing mail sorting machines are used for incoming mail sorting. These machines have large footprints and are considered costly.
Usually when an organization has volumes of incoming mail that warrant an incoming mail sorting apparatus, they also have a large number of required sort destinations, also known as mailstops, needed as delivery points across their organization. Typically, an organization may have a large number of mailstops thereby requiring a large number of receiving bins in the mail sorting machine. The requirement for a large number of receiving bins increases the cost of these machines. These machines also have very large footprints when outfitted with a substantial number of receiving bins, in comparison to the typical allotment of floor space for mail sorting. When the sorting apparatus has the same number of required sort destinations as it has receiving bins, then the sorting process can be handled with a single-pass of the mailpieces through the apparatus.
There are sorting apparatus that are better suited for incoming sorting when cost and space constraints are a concern. These sorters often have fewer receiving bins than the number of required sort destinations. As a result, the mailpieces need to make multiple passes through the apparatus to get sorted to the proper receiving bin. There are a number of schemes available to maximize the sort process for multi-pass sorting apparatus. In a multi-pass apparatus, the common requirement is to take a portion of the mailpieces from the output end, then manually reload them into the input end of the machine and reprocess the mailpieces further. Multi-pass machines usually have smaller footprints because they have far fewer receiving bins then their single-pass counterparts. This also contributes to their lower cost.
The trade-off for the smaller and less-costly multi-pass machines is that they are considerably slower and more costly to operate because of the labor and time required for processing the mailpieces more than once. Mailpieces in multi-pass machines experience more wear and tear then in a single-pass machine.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a mail sorting method and system having the ability to sort incoming mailpieces using a single pass process with fewer receiving bins than the number of mailstops being sorted.